I saw an article today saying that GTA6 has opened for preorders, and that it costs like $100. And presumably that’s USD, so in australia it’ll probably be more like $120. And that’s before you start getting into premium editions that include extra hats. Oh, and the “physical copy” doesn’t actually include a disc, just a download code that will stop working at some date that isn’t written down anywhere.

Having seen this, I’d just like to make a couple of PSAs:

1. If you pre-order a game, you are a moron.
2. If you pay $100 for a game, you are a fucking moron.

I should probably start by noting that there are – extremely rare – exceptions to both of these rules. For example:

• I pre-ordered a couple of Zachtronics games. Because it was Zachtronics and they can do no wrong. But they’re not a AAA studio making billions off of their games, and they also have never released anything that was broken on day 1 and required a 60gb update.
• If you’ve put well over a hundred hours into a game, and you love and cherish it with all of your heart, and you love and cherish all the people who made it because you love it so much, and you want to support those people and give them extra money, or if you’re buying some collectors edition of some widely-cherished game, then it might be worth spending $100 or more. So for example if you’re buying a mint sealed copy of the original Doom, that might be justified.

But these are very rare exceptions, and in the vast majority of cases, the rules hold true. You should absolutely never under any circumstances pre-order a AAA game. And you should absolutely under no circumstances ever pay $100 for a AAA game.

Maybe it’s fair to change “game” to “AAA game” in the rules above.

Some tips on how to survive without preordering and paying $100 for a game

“But”, i hear you say, “I need GTA6! And if I don’t pre-order I won’t have it on release day! And all my friends will laugh at me!”

Wow. Such hardship. I feel your pain.

No, really, I do. I’d really love to play Civilisation 7. And it even supports Linux – they’re one of the few who haven’t dropped Linux support in favour of not really supporting proton. So I’d really like to give them my money. But I’m not paying $120 for a game. Not for any game, ever.

Once upon a time, I was pretty keen to play Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. And it even supports Linux, so I’d like to give them my money. But it’s still listed at $60 for the base game without any of the DLC and expansions – i.e not the whole game. So I haven’t bought it yet. Maybe in another 10 years.

I fell for the trap once, a long time ago. There was a game that I waited, and waited, and waited for. A game that was going to change the world with it’s revolutionary approach to FPS gaming. That was going to be super-super interactive – one quote I recall was “you can play with everything”. And packed to the gills with humour and an awesome storyline about an old villain coming back for revenge on our hero. So when it finally came out, I pre-ordered the deluxe edition, and paid $120 for Duke Nukem Forever.

I was setting myself up for disappointment. By this point I had come to accept that there was no way the game could possibly be worth the wait – no game is that good. But… like… it would still be good, right?

Yeah, nah.

You should never, ever, ever pay that sort of money for a game that you haven’t already put at least 100 hours into. If you don’t know that it’s an amazing gaming experience then you don’t know that it’s worth that kind of cash.

I don’t care how much the billion dollar studio spent making it. That’s their problem.

If you spend that kind of money on a game, you’re normalising the practice of charging outrageous prices for games. And they’ll just charge you more for the next game.

If you pre-order a game, there’s no incentive for them to make it good. They already have your money.

There is an embarrassment of riches out there when it comes to games these days. Lots of them are super-affordable. And games always go on sale and get cheaper as they age. The ones that don’t, you shouldn’t buy, because they’re a rip-off. See also: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

An interesting thing about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is that when it came out, I had just played and liked Borderlands 2, so I was keen to play it. But I held out because I’m not buying an incomplete game, and I’m not spending $70 on a game. I would maybe have paid $30 or perhaps even $35 for a complete edition with all expansions/dlc. But as time has gone by and this price/edition has not materialised, my interest in it has waned. Now I might consider paying $20 for it.

But as I was saying, there’s an embarrassment of riches out there when it comes to seriously amazing and very affordable games. For instance, you can buy Deus Ex, the greatest game ever made, on sale on GOG right now for $5.25, or on the humble store on a not-sale price of $10.45. This is a game I’ve put at least 200 hours into over the decades. Alternatively, you can buy what I think it probably the second-greatest game ever made, Kerbal Space Program, on sale on GOG for $14.99. Admittedly this one does have a non-sale price of $60, and there are two expansion packs which are about $6 each, so that’s at the pricey end of the spectrum – but I did call it the second-greatest game ever made. And in terms of hours it might be first, I’ve got at least 1000 hours of play time in KSP.

The trick with games like that is to add them to your wishlist and wait till they come up on sale at a reasonable price.

Play other games instead while you wait. This is very not difficult to achieve – I’ve got over 100 games in my steam library which I’ve never played. I pick them up when they’re cheap and if I think I’ll like the look of them. Some of them have been really amazing and huge time sinks. Super Hexagon is a great example of this, it’s currently on sale on GOG for $1, and it’s non-sale price on humble store is $4.50. Given the chance I’d pay $10 for super hexagon today and consider that a bargain. But I don’t have to because I bought it on sale a decade ago for like $2. There’s also widely-recognised classics out there for cheap these days: KOTOR 1 and 2 are on sale on GOG at the moment for $5.25 each.

(Disclosure: None of the above are affiliate links. I get nothing if you buy these games except perhaps a new multiplayer opponent and some smug self-satisfaction knowing I’ve deprived rockstar of $120)

(Note also: This is not an ad for GOG, or the humble store. My only recommendation is that you don’t buy things on steam. There’s excellent cheap games available in a bunch of places: itch.io has lots, and zoom-platform.com has tons of awesome, affordable games, too. It’s also the the only place you can get a good copy of Duke3D with Linux support these days, since gearbox decided to remove the excellent Megaton edition from steam and replace it with their worse version. And I’m sure I’ll think of 3 other great stores where you can get good games cheap as soon as I hit “post”)

And that’s before we start getting into free and open source games. And there’s heaps of those that are really excellent. I’m going to give a shout-out here to teeworlds, which I’ve posted about before.

If you’d like me to recommend about a hundred other seriously fantastic games that can be had for much less than $20, let me know, and I’ll write up a list for you. It’ll be long enough that you won’t have any shortage of games to play while you’re waiting for GTA6 to go on sale.

Side-Benefits of this approach

There’s a heap of little side-benefits that you get from taking my approach to games:

• You tend to buy and play games late, after they’ve been out a while. This means that you have a better opportunity to evaluate whether they’re even worth playing, because the hype has had time to die down, and you can evaluate the real critical reception of the game, if such things matter to you.
• Another benefit of buying games after they’ve been out for a while is that you get to play them without all the horrible day-1 bugs and broken/overcrowded servers that all the morons put up with. Instead you get a stable experience as the game was meant to be, before it was rushed to meet some release date.
• You tend to get the complete game, not some version where you pay $60 for two-thirds of the game, and play it through, and then pay more money for the rest of the game and some bonus hats, and presumably play it through again with a different costume on? At a certain point it tends to become more economical for the game devs to stop maintaining separate versions, and they’ll often just give all that “bonus” content to people who bought the base game for free to reduce the burden of maintaining the DLCs and addons as separate products.
• You become immune to the bullshit hype trains that surround modern gaming releases, and the toxic attitudes and cynical highway robbery business practices of modern games companies. This is maybe the best side-effect, if I’m honest.
• You stop doing the upgrade treadmill, where you’re buying new hardware every 18 months in order to play the latest shininess. Or running stuff at low detail because you haven’t upgraded your graphics card in the last seven minutes. I buy games when it suits me, and I play them when it suits me and when I have a machine that will run them. Sometimes I have to wait a bit on the second count because I don’t upgrade my machined very often. This sometimes leads to awesome moments where I get a new graphics card and can finally play something that I enjoyed but which could barely run at super high detail, or am now able to run something that I wasn’t previously able to run (but have bought because it was on sale for $4.99 a year ago)

As someone who was super into the whole thing two decades ago, I can tell you unequivocably that this is a superior approach to playing games. Do it on your schedule, when you want to, at your budget. Don’t let some marketer at epic or rockstar or valve tell you how to play games, do it on your own terms.

“But my terms are to play the latest thing today!”

You’ve just been conditioned to think like that. Grow out of it. I did. And it was the best thing that ever happened for me WRT gaming. I enjoy it much more now than I ever did when I was on the hype train.

And, frankly, games were better when I was on the hype train, IMO. They were less shit, and less marred by shitty business practices: When you bought a game, you got the whole game. Imagine that. And none of them ever asked me for $1.99 for a new costume. And all those games? They all still work today if I slap the disc into my machine and install them. But also I think there was more innovation, or something. Those games were more fun and appealing to me. Maybe that’s just me being an old man. I bought hardware to play Unreal back in the day. But I actually think Unreal was probably more worth buying hardware for than anything that has come out in the last ~10 years. There might be exceptions to that, but they’re rare IMO.

TLDR: Don’t play the game of the game-makers. Fuck them. They’re almost universally toxic and they’re just trying to rape you and squeeze every dollar they can out of you, while delivering two-thirds of a substandard product. Don’t pre-order games, and don’t pay the outrageous prices that they’re trying to normalise. If you don’t do it, they’ll have to readjust and be more reasonable.

Play games on your terms, not theirs.